Nasserism, Global Mexico and the Birth of a Latin-African Politics

Sarah Quesada will explain in this talk how Egypt’s first president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, introduced a notion of Third World solidarity to Mexico and Latin America more broadly as early as the 1950s. I argue that Nasser offered a concept of Global South interdependence through the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) he built with Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru and Yugoslavia’s Josip Tito. But unlike his non-aligned co-conspirators, Nasser included Latin America in his solidarity project. Nasser’s philosophies—or Nasserism—became a sensation in Latin America seemingly overnight. In Mexico more specifically, Nasser even weathered conservative and hostile campaigns that the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) waged against him, attempting to sway Mexican intellectuals away from his camp. From Octavio Paz’s beginning inklings of interest in Nasser to contemporary Carmen Boullosa or Alberto Ruy Sánchez’s interest in the supremacy of the Egyptian empire, the Nasserist legacy had a lasting impact in Mexico and beyond because it offered a notion of allyship unavailable in leftist discourses that this talk will center.

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English and Comparative Literature

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